I'm a product design engineer. I build delivery systems and ship the interfaces they produce.

I started in hardware. My B.Eng was in microelectronics at SUSTech: five years of circuits, physics, and code, learning to reason about systems from the transistor up. I could build things that worked, but I wanted to build things people could actually use, and that turn started inside the degree rather than after it. My capstone was a cognition experiment about how people correct their aim, submitted to an electrical engineering department.

That's what brought me to Human Factors at George Mason, a deliberate move to deepen my understanding of HCI on top of the engineering I already had. The bet was that a technical background plus real psychology training would give me more product leverage than either one alone. It did: I learned to run studies, model cognition, and design for how people actually perceive and decide, then turn around and build what the research called for.

Since then I've closed the loop by shipping. At Solara and Treevah I designed product experiences and systems. I built TasteLed to turn client-configured briefs into delivered sites, and run AethrDesign for custom AI web apps and embedded product work in React. The throughline hasn't changed: understand the system, respect the human, and actually ship.

That work also raised the bar on what I needed technically. The interface is my scope, but it is never independent of what it sits on — the data shape, the API, the constraints an engineer is actually working under. So I'm finishing an M.S. in Information Studies at Trine, on the computer science side: enough of the systems and data layer to design against it honestly instead of guessing at it. The program is structured for working professionals, so I'm fully available for full-time roles now.

Client work has constraints; side projects don't, which is where I find out what I can actually build. I run a local agentic system on my own machine: a wiki, a records vault, and a set of skills and automations that Claude drives. Lab renders that graph live, in 3D.

This site is the other one. Its design system, MDX content pipeline, in-page editing tools, and the planning graph I chart each case study on before writing it were built here, not bought. The style guide documents what came out.

Outside client work I show up locally: ADPList meetups, AGSA gatherings, and design events like Usabilathon around the Washington DC metro.